I presume you have been able to download and install the VSTi yourself, and that you see it in the VST-list in Ableton Live.

Start up a new project, and drag the sanestation vsti into a MIDI-track. Rename the track to SaneStation. It is not important, but I will persume you did, so it makes it easier to follow along here. This will be the main track for controlling the synth, and editing patches and stuff. You can only have one instance of SaneStation, or it will probably crash, so keep one in there.

Now, add another MIDI-track. (Ctrl-shift-T)

Set “MIDI To” to point to “SaneStation”

In the dropdown box underneath, chose “1-sanestation”.

Add a new MIDI-clip in the track, and set both “bank”, “sub-bank” and “program” to 1.

Then add some notes and hit play.

To tweak the sound, select the SaneStation track, and the VSTi interface should pop up.

Make a cool sound.

Add another MIDI track.

Set MIDI To to SaneStation and 2-sanestation

Add a MIDI-clip, and set “Bank” and “Sub-Bank” to 1, “Program” to 2. Add some notes, hit play.

To edit the sound for this channel, select the SaneStation track again, and in the Track View-pane select “Instrument 1” in the sanestation contoller.

You can now tweak the sound in the VSTi GUI.

Repeat this for aditional tracks.

Do all your composing and arranging and stuff like that, as usual.

When you are done, and ready to export you have to do the following.

In arrangement view

Make sure that every track starts at the same time,fill in with blank clips if necessary.

For each track, select all the clips in the track.

Right click, and choose “consolidate”

Right click again, on each track, an choose to export midi clip.

Name them wisely.

Open the VSTi-GUI for SaneStation, and export the soundbank to the same directory as all the midi-clips.

You should now be able to put all the files together with the compile-utility that came with SaneStation. Refer to that manual/readme for how it is done.

There might be easier and/or better ways to do this in Live, but this was the thing I figured out could work, and it did in testing, so…

Let me know if something is hard to understand, or if there are any problems.

There is also some information about using VSTs with multiple channels in an article from SoundOnSound